Objects and Affect: The Materialities of Greek Drama

What happened to fifth-century theatrical costumes and properties after their initial production? This paper surveys the textual evidence of a market for theatrical materials in fifth-century Athens and sketches out some of the practicalities and ramifications of such an exchange. Specifically, it considers how the theatrical reuse of tragic equipment from past performances—what Marvin Carlson (2001) has labeled “ghosting”— would have constituted a unique form of paratragedy which could claim not only semiotic reference to, but also phenomenological identity with, the parodied model.

The satyr dramas of fifth-century Athens share many features with their better-known theatrical counterparts, tragedy and comedy. In the use of costume and stage properties, however, satyr drama exhibits a distinct approach that stems from the form’s most essential attribute: its chorus of half-human, half-equine satyrs.

For somewhat obvious reasons theorists of tragic effect often privilege spectacle when analyzing what constitutes its complex aesthetics, but it alone cannot account for all of the conflicting sensations generated onstage and induced in the audience. Although an emphasis on other senses may be expected in the plays that center on the blind Oedipus (especially in Oedipus at Colonus), my paper focuses instead on Sophocles' Electra and Euripides' Electra and Orestes.

The urn in Sophocles’ Electra may be the most affectively fraught object in Greek tragedy, but it is also presents an epistemological question: what truth can objects convey? Electra’s lament over the urn that she believes to contain the ashes of her dead brother – but the audience knows to be empty – confronts viewers, onstage and off, with a troubling conjunction of genuine emotion and acknowledged falsehood.

“Ashes … annihilate or threaten to annihilate even the possibility of testifying to annihilation itself.” (Derrida 2000:183)